“At Quorn,” I repeat, and then I find the letter which Lord Lonsdale was writing.  This is it:—­

CHURCHILL COTTAGE, QUORN, LOUGHBOROUGH, Tuesday, November 2, ’97.

MY DEAR SIR HENRY,—­How can I thank you enough for your magnificent present?  It is, indeed, kind of you thinking of me, and I can assure you that the spurs shall remain an “heirloom” to decorate the dinner-table (a novel ornament) and match the silver spur poor old White Melville gave me.  Why you should have so honoured me I do not know, but that I fully value your kindly thought I do know.

Is there any chance of your being in these parts?  If so, do pay me a visit.

And with many, many thanks for your extreme kindness,

Believe me

Yours very truly,

(Signed) LONSDALE.

Alas! almost all of them have passed away, yet they will live while the memory of the generation lasts which called them friends.  They have vanished from the scenes in which they played so prominent a part, and yet their influence remains.

There was the old Admiral himself, the king of sportsmen and good fellows.  Horse or man-o’-war, it was all one to him; and although sport may not be regarded as of the same importance with politics, who knows which has the more beneficial influence on mankind?  I would have backed Admiral Rous to save us from war, and if we drifted into it to save us from the enemy, against any man in the world.  Then there was his bosom friend George Payne, and the old, old Squire George Osbaldeston, Lord Falmouth, W.S.  Crawfurd, the Earl of Wilton, Lord Bradford, Lord Rosslyn, Lord Vivian, the Duke of Hamilton, George Brace, General Mark Wood, Alexander, Lord Westmorland, the Earl of Aylesbury, Clare Vyner, Dudley, Milner, Sir John Astley ("The Mate"), Lords Suffolk and Berkshire, Coventry and Clonmell, Manton, Ker Seymer—­the names crowd upon my memory; then, alas! a long, long while after, Henry Calcraft, Lord Granville, Lord Portsmouth, and “Prince Eddy,” Lord Gerard, the Earl of Hardwicke, Viscount Royston, Sam Batchelor, and Tyrwhitt Wilson.

These are some of those whom I remember, and, by the way, I ought to add the Duke of Westminster and Tom Jennings, names interesting and distinguished, and indicative of a phase of life ever full of enjoyment such as is not known out of the sporting world, where excitement lends to pleasure the effervescence and sparkle which make life something more than animal existence.

This is true in hunting, racing, cricket, and I should think intensified in the highest degree in a charge of cavalry.  Take Balaclava, for instance:  the very fact of staking life at such odds must have compressed into that moment a whole life of ordinary pleasure.

I will mention a few more names, and then close another chapter of my memory.  There was Mr. J.A.  Craven, the Duke of St. Albans, the Duke of Beaufort, Montagu Tharp, Major Egerton, General Pearson, Lord Calthorpe, Henry Saville, Douglas Gordon (Mr. Briggs), Oliver Montagu, Henry Leeson, the Earl of Milltown, Sir Henry Devereux, Johnny Shafto, Douglas Phillips, Randolph Churchill, Lord Exeter, Lord Stamford.